Online Resource Library
Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comVincent Word Studies - Luke 4:29 - 4:29
(Show All Books | Show All Chapters)
This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
The brow (ὀφρύος)
Only here in New Testament. Wyc., cope, which is originally cap or hood. The word is used in medical language both of the eyebrows and of other projections of the body. It would naturally occur to a physician, especially since the same epithets were applied to the appearance of the eyebrows in certain diseases as were applied to kills. Thus Hippocrates, describing a deadly fever, says, “The eyebrows seem to hang over,” the same word which Homer uses of a rock. So Aretaeus, describing the appearance of the eyebrows in elephantiasis, depicts them as προβλῆτες, projecting, and όχθώδεις, like mounds. Stanley says: “Most readers probably from these words imagine a town built on the summit of a mountain, from which summit the intended precipitation was to take place. This is not the situation of Nazareth; yet its position is still in accordance with the narrative. It is built upon, that is, on the side of a mountain, but the brow is not beneath, but over the town, and such a cliff as is here implied is found in the abrupt face of a limestone rock about thirty or forty feet high, overhanging the Maronite convent at the southwest corner of the town” (“Sinai and Palestine”).
Cast him down headlong (κατακρημνίσαι)
Only here in New Testament, and in the Septuagint only in 2 Chronicles 25:12.